I think this post is emblematic of the problem I have with most of Val’s writing: there are useful nuggets of insight here and there, but you’re meant to swallow them along with a metric ton of typical mind fallacy, projection, confirmation bias, and manipulative narrativemancy.
Elsewhere, Val has written words approximated by ~”I tried for years to fit my words into the shape the rationalists wanted me to, and now I’ve given up and I’m just going to speak my mind.”
This is what it sounds like when you are blind to an important distinction. Trying to hedge magic things that you do not grok, engaging in cargo culting. If it feels like tediously shuffling around words and phrases that all mean exactly the same thing, you’re missing the vast distances on the axis that you aren’t perceiving.
The core message of “hey, you might well be caught up in a false narrative that is doing emotional work for you via providing some sense of meaning or purpose and yanking you around by your panic systems, and recognizing that fact can allow you to do anything else” is a good one, and indeed it’s one that many LessWrongers need. It’s even the sort of message that needs some kind of shock along with it, to make readers go “oh shit, that might actually be me.”
But that message does not need to come along with a million little manipulations. That message isn’t improved by attempts to hypnotize the audience, or set up little narrative traps.
e.g. starting with “There’s a kind of game, here, and it’s rude to point out, and you’re not supposed to name it, but I’m going to.” <—I’m one of the cool ones who sees the Matrix! I’m brave and I’m gonna buck the rules! (Reminiscent of a right-wing radio host going “you get punished if you say X” and then going on to spend twenty minutes on X without being punished. It’s a cheap attempt to inflate the importance of the message and the messenger.)
e.g. “I really do respect the right for folk to keep playing it if they want” <—More delegitimization, more status moves. A strong implication along the lines of “the illusion that I, Val, have correctly identified is the only thing happening here.” Not even a token acknowledgement of the possibility that perhaps some of it is not this particular game; no thought given to the possibility that maybe Val is flawed in a way that is not true of all the other LWers. Like the Mythbusters leaping from “well, we couldn’t recreate it” to “therefore, it’s impossible and it never happened, myth BUSTED.”
(I’m really really really tired of the dynamic where someone notices that they’ve been making Mistake X for many years and then just presumes that everyone else is, too, and just blind to it in the same way that they themselves were. It especially rankles when they’re magnanimous about it.)
e.g. “You have to live in a kind of mental illusion to be in terror of the end of the world.” <—More projection, more typical minding, more ~”I’ve comprehended all of the gears here and there’s no way anything else could lead to appropriate terror of the end of the world. The mistake I made is the mistake everyone’s making (but don’t worry, I’m here to guide you out with my superior wisdom, being as I am ahead of you on this one.” See also the actual quote “for what it’s worth, as someone who turned off the game and has reworked his body’s use of power quite a lot, it’s pretty obvious to me that this isn’t how it works,” which, like basically everything else here, is conspicuously missing a pretty damn important for me. The idea that other people might be doing something other than what Val comprehends seems literally not to occur to him.
e.g. “I mean this with respect and admiration. It’s very skillful. Eliezer has incredible mastery in how he weaves terror and insight together.” <—Look! See how I’m above it all, and in a position to evaluate what’s going on? Pay no attention to the fact that this incidentally raises my apparent status, btw.
e.g. “In case that was too opaque for you just yet, I basically just said ‘Your thoughts will do what they can to distract you from your true underlying fear.’ … This is slow work. Unfortunately your ‘drug’ supply is internal, so getting sober is quite a trick.” <—If your experience doesn’t match my predictions, it’s because you’re unskillful, and making [mistake]...but don’t worry, with my “yet” I will subtly imply that if you just keep on listening to my voice, you will eventually see the light. Pay no attention to the fully general counterevidence-dismissing system I’m setting up.
Again, it’s a shame, because bits like “If your body’s emergency mobilization systems are running in response to an issue, but your survival doesn’t actually depend on actions on a timescale of minutes, then you are not perceiving reality accurately” are well worth considering. But the essay sort of forces you to step into Val’s (broken, self-serving, overconfident) frame in order to catch those nuggets. And, among readers who are consciously wise or unconsciously allergic to the sort of manipulation he’s trying to pull, many of them will simply bounce off the thing entirely, and notcatch those useful nuggets.
It didn’t have to be this way. It didn’t have to be arrogant and project-y and author-elevating and oh-so-cynical-and-aloof. There’s another version of this essay out there in possibility space that contains all of the good insights and none of the poison.
But that’s not what we got. Instead, we got a thing that (it seems to me (though I could be wrong)) had the net effect of marginally shifting LW’s discourse in the wrong direction, by virtue of being a popular performance piece wrapped around an actually useful insight or two. It normalizes a kind of sloppy failure-to-be-careful-and-clear that is antithetical to the mission of becoming less wrong. I think this essay lowered the quality of thinking on the site, even as it performed the genuinely useful service of opening some eyes to the problem Val has identified.
(Because no, of course Val was not alone in this issue, it really is a problem that affects Lots Of Humans, it’s just not the only thing going on. Some humans really do just … not have those particular flaws. When you’re colorblind, you can’t see that there are colors that you can’t see, and so it’s hard to account for them, especially if you’re not even bothering to try.)
Are there any similar versions of this post on LW which express the same message, but without the patronising tone of Valentine? Would that be valuable?
I think this post is emblematic of the problem I have with most of Val’s writing: there are useful nuggets of insight here and there, but you’re meant to swallow them along with a metric ton of typical mind fallacy, projection, confirmation bias, and manipulative narrativemancy.
Elsewhere, Val has written words approximated by ~”I tried for years to fit my words into the shape the rationalists wanted me to, and now I’ve given up and I’m just going to speak my mind.”
This is what it sounds like when you are blind to an important distinction. Trying to hedge magic things that you do not grok, engaging in cargo culting. If it feels like tediously shuffling around words and phrases that all mean exactly the same thing, you’re missing the vast distances on the axis that you aren’t perceiving.
The core message of “hey, you might well be caught up in a false narrative that is doing emotional work for you via providing some sense of meaning or purpose and yanking you around by your panic systems, and recognizing that fact can allow you to do anything else” is a good one, and indeed it’s one that many LessWrongers need. It’s even the sort of message that needs some kind of shock along with it, to make readers go “oh shit, that might actually be me.”
But that message does not need to come along with a million little manipulations. That message isn’t improved by attempts to hypnotize the audience, or set up little narrative traps.
e.g. starting with “There’s a kind of game, here, and it’s rude to point out, and you’re not supposed to name it, but I’m going to.” <—I’m one of the cool ones who sees the Matrix! I’m brave and I’m gonna buck the rules! (Reminiscent of a right-wing radio host going “you get punished if you say X” and then going on to spend twenty minutes on X without being punished. It’s a cheap attempt to inflate the importance of the message and the messenger.)
e.g. “I really do respect the right for folk to keep playing it if they want” <—More delegitimization, more status moves. A strong implication along the lines of “the illusion that I, Val, have correctly identified is the only thing happening here.” Not even a token acknowledgement of the possibility that perhaps some of it is not this particular game; no thought given to the possibility that maybe Val is flawed in a way that is not true of all the other LWers. Like the Mythbusters leaping from “well, we couldn’t recreate it” to “therefore, it’s impossible and it never happened, myth BUSTED.”
(I’m really really really tired of the dynamic where someone notices that they’ve been making Mistake X for many years and then just presumes that everyone else is, too, and just blind to it in the same way that they themselves were. It especially rankles when they’re magnanimous about it.)
e.g. “You have to live in a kind of mental illusion to be in terror of the end of the world.” <—More projection, more typical minding, more ~”I’ve comprehended all of the gears here and there’s no way anything else could lead to appropriate terror of the end of the world. The mistake I made is the mistake everyone’s making (but don’t worry, I’m here to guide you out with my superior wisdom, being as I am ahead of you on this one.” See also the actual quote “for what it’s worth, as someone who turned off the game and has reworked his body’s use of power quite a lot, it’s pretty obvious to me that this isn’t how it works,” which, like basically everything else here, is conspicuously missing a pretty damn important for me. The idea that other people might be doing something other than what Val comprehends seems literally not to occur to him.
e.g. “I mean this with respect and admiration. It’s very skillful. Eliezer has incredible mastery in how he weaves terror and insight together.” <—Look! See how I’m above it all, and in a position to evaluate what’s going on? Pay no attention to the fact that this incidentally raises my apparent status, btw.
e.g. “In case that was too opaque for you just yet, I basically just said ‘Your thoughts will do what they can to distract you from your true underlying fear.’ … This is slow work. Unfortunately your ‘drug’ supply is internal, so getting sober is quite a trick.” <—If your experience doesn’t match my predictions, it’s because you’re unskillful, and making [mistake]...but don’t worry, with my “yet” I will subtly imply that if you just keep on listening to my voice, you will eventually see the light. Pay no attention to the fully general counterevidence-dismissing system I’m setting up.
Again, it’s a shame, because bits like “If your body’s emergency mobilization systems are running in response to an issue, but your survival doesn’t actually depend on actions on a timescale of minutes, then you are not perceiving reality accurately” are well worth considering. But the essay sort of forces you to step into Val’s (broken, self-serving, overconfident) frame in order to catch those nuggets. And, among readers who are consciously wise or unconsciously allergic to the sort of manipulation he’s trying to pull, many of them will simply bounce off the thing entirely, and not catch those useful nuggets.
It didn’t have to be this way. It didn’t have to be arrogant and project-y and author-elevating and oh-so-cynical-and-aloof. There’s another version of this essay out there in possibility space that contains all of the good insights and none of the poison.
But that’s not what we got. Instead, we got a thing that (it seems to me (though I could be wrong)) had the net effect of marginally shifting LW’s discourse in the wrong direction, by virtue of being a popular performance piece wrapped around an actually useful insight or two. It normalizes a kind of sloppy failure-to-be-careful-and-clear that is antithetical to the mission of becoming less wrong. I think this essay lowered the quality of thinking on the site, even as it performed the genuinely useful service of opening some eyes to the problem Val has identified.
(Because no, of course Val was not alone in this issue, it really is a problem that affects Lots Of Humans, it’s just not the only thing going on. Some humans really do just … not have those particular flaws. When you’re colorblind, you can’t see that there are colors that you can’t see, and so it’s hard to account for them, especially if you’re not even bothering to try.)
Are there any similar versions of this post on LW which express the same message, but without the patronising tone of Valentine? Would that be valuable?